


Silicon Lines

by Clockenstein



Category: Pocket Monsters | Pokemon (Main Video Game Series), Pocket Monsters: Diamond & Pearl & Platinum | Pokemon Diamond Pearl Platinum Versions
Genre: Coming of Age, Cyberpunk, Gen, Minimalism, Nuzlocke Challenge, Post-Apocalypse
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-09-03
Updated: 2018-02-25
Packaged: 2019-03-23 02:47:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 18
Words: 12,344
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13778052
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Clockenstein/pseuds/Clockenstein
Summary: A strange boy must come to grips with a strange, warped, digital world.





	1. boot_driver_false

**Author's Note:**

> Experimental writing. This run borrows heavily from my knowledge as a CS major, and so there's a lot of terminology being thrown around and concepts that will tie into that kinda stuff. I'll try my best to establish connections and make all this accessible, but I understand all of this stuff can be off-putting. For reference: in this work, Pokémon are often referred to in shorthand by their Pokédex number.
> 
> Let me know what you think; I'm open to constructive criticism -- especially when it comes to writing style, or even whether I'm applying CS terminology right, if you're in the same field. Thanks for reading!
> 
> (This run was originally posted to the Nuzlocke Forums, and in general, the forum version will update first.)

Waking up feels more like I've crashed to earth -- like I'd lost orbit, burnt up in the atmosphere, smacked head-first into the clay. Survived.  
  
The only thing missing is the sound. I think, not knowing for sure, that a meteor that lands like I must have announces itself in triumphant sound and vibrant color -- it expects to be crowned king of its freshly turned soil, ravaging its domain when the crown lands far from its feet.  
  
But the silence is oppressive, and the only colors are hues in grayscale.  
  
Everything is dizzying. Everything feels like it's on fire. And yet -- everything feels numb. And something -- something, inside, is trying to pass for a brain, doing its best, unwinding the tangled strings and sinews and veins that refuse to unrest my body from the earth.  
  
It's doing its best. It's doing such a bad job. Every nerve that comes to life sets off a hundred sparks and the pain spikes millionfold. But eventually, finally, I can feel sensation run over my fingers, and -- slowly at first -- I push them against the ground, wobble to my -- my feet. It feels weird, suddenly, knowing I can move _feet_. More than that -- oddly, it feels _new_.  
  
The dizzying starts to fade as I take the first step. A breeze washes itself over me, the color with it, like a flood, and the fire dies out.  
  
I look around, for the first time, and see cracked stone facades towering over streets ripped open at the seam, cars tumbled and strewn over my path like the discarded playtoys of a giant -- and over all of it, an orange glow. The sun. The sunset.  
  
It's weird. It all feels _new_. I don't know why it is, or why it's the only word that comes to mind. But it is, and the fact, the excitement, buzzes inside of me.  
  
My steps wobble over the unsteady rock, hands stretched out for balance, body coming to grip -- when the rock gives way and crumbles, and I feel myself crash again, roughly, on clay.  
  
The last thing I see is something -- someone -- turning around, yelping something I can't hear, a blur of a face that looks into mine before everything goes black.


	2. boot_safe_true

"...on him either. But I--"

Rust.

"...fix that in three seconds if I need to. The only problem here is..."

Rust is what it smells like, rust is what it tastes like, rust is what it feels like. Wherever I am, I mean.

"...enough of these trips. Scrap metal isn't worth..."

Where -- I sure as hell don't know where. But I know I keep coming to, passing out, coming to, loop indefinite.

Awake, I can't feel my arms, or feet -- just a dull pain, somewhere, that drags me back into not awake.

"...two weeks? It's not like the Russians ever gave a..."

The other thing is that I can hear arguing.

"...so important that you have to go across a government border, exactly?"

Or, well, bits and pieces of it.

"...case you didn't notice, you're not the only one with airquotes funding..."

My brain isn't doing that thing it did last time. I kind of wish it did.

Being on fire definitely beats being quadriplegic, I think.

Huh.

That doesn't sound right, actually.

"...vested interest in my sons not being arrested outside of Russian jurisdiction."

It's then that I figure I could at least try to move, but when I do, I regret it -- it's the pain spike from before. Except times another hundred and it's on fast forward so all the sparks ignite at once. Reflexively, I find myself sitting up, clutching the source of the pain -- the arm.

Except I do it with the other arm. So the pain just doubles and I wince.

"Ow! Oww..."

The moment I yelp in pain, the voices stop arguing. That's when I freeze, self-conscious.

...That was my voice. I can talk.

Wait. What's so weird about being able to talk?

I don't get the extra second to think. The next moment, three people walk into the room: two boys and an older-looking man, who's the first to talk.

"You're awake, then."


	3. Repairing local drive (F:)

I can't get their names straight. I've asked them, I think, twice already, and the weird thing is that they don't seem to mind, which makes it worse.   
  
"Lucas."  
  
"It's Gavin," the other chimes in.  
  
I mean.   
  
I have the names right.  
  
It's just -- it's five seconds later, and I can't remember who said which, because they sound kind of the same. So I think they must be brothers, but they barely look anything alike: the taller boy has a crop of messy raven hair and blue eyes; the shorter one has curly, platinum-blonde hair and hazel eyes.   
  
I think the taller boy is Lucas and the shorter one is Gavin. I think, too, that I'm about their age, because I'm shoulder-to-shoulder with probably Lucas. I want to not have to say probably, but I'm kind of afraid that I'll get it wrong and they'll mind for real then, when I do.  
  


* * *

  
The older man behind them introduces himself as Rowan and adds another name to the end of it. Hawthorne. Both of those names are trees, I think.   
  
I ask him if his sons were named for trees.   
  
"Do you name your son Stone if your last name is Wall?"  
  
I guess not.  
  
"He would do that," Gavin says.  
  
"And then maybe I should have named you Brick, if screaming at the both of you was anything to go by."  
  


* * *

  
Lucas, I think, is the one who I saw when I blacked out. At, least, because--  
  
"He couldn't find any ID on you," Rowan explains, clacking away at a keyboard as he does. "No database entries either, now that I'm looking."  
  
Whatever that meant.  
  
"You don't exist, basically," the dark-haired boy says.   
  
Oh.  
  
I guess that must be Lucas.  
  
The blond boy -- Gavin, definitely, now -- starts. "Didn't you say you were going to--"   
  
"Getting there," Rowan interrupts. He doesn't once look up. "You have a name, right?"  
  
"An, uh...name?"   
  
I freeze here.   
  
Name. _Name._ Uh. Shit. I, uh.  
  
Lucas just whistles. "Smooth."  
  


* * *

  
Gavin says the way he thinks that it works is that the amnesiac will always name themselves for the first thing that catches their interest. He tells me this over the dinner plate he has brought back to his room -- Rowan said he'd give me the afternoon to think about it.  
  
"Want some?" Gavin asked, pointing at the pile of beans in sauce covering his plate.   
  
It looks like a mound of clay. And I think I remember crash-landing on one of those. Or at least, feeling like I did.  
  
I tell Gavin I've already eaten.   
  


* * *

  
Rowan tells me he'll use his surname for the whole thing. He says it's "so the Russians give less of a shit than they already do".  
  
"So, like," I say, "a precaution." He just shrugs broadly.  
  
"Something like that."   
  


* * *

  
  
When he leaves the room, my name is Clay Hawthorne.  
  
I am a boy who, I think, fell out of the sky.


	4. shift register enabled

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More definitions for relevant terms can be found by entering the command [man c4.s | more.]
> 
> RTFM -- Read The Fucking Manual. If you are asking for technological help from an expert, it is assumed that you have in fact read the relevant documentation and attempted your own, informed diagnostics to no avail before you undertake what should be a last resort.
> 
> White-hat -- White-hat hacking is a term for attempting to break encryption schemes -- not maliciously, but rather to expose potential flaws, backdoors, exploits, and bugs in security paradigms, with the intent of improving such schemes. This is in contrast to black-hat hacking, which is malicious code-breaking -- an activity often correlated with what the general public knows as hackers, and are known to the actual hacker community (who find the use of the term hacker as a pejorative insulting) as crackers.

Rowan Hawthorne is pissed. It is a Saturday evening.  
  
These are not statements you want to see together unless, like the jaded, dime-a-dozen, humor-overstayed teenagers who infest every urban corner of Rowan's own Virtual Network, you possess a vested interest in the notion of your immortal soul being rent from your pimply, Slavic face.  
  
On Saturday evenings, Rowan Hawthorne is not meant to be pissed. He is meant to be writing the code for a new batch of daemons -- anywhere between twenty and a hundred and fifty-six of the damn things -- for a client update (another one), and instead he is dealing with some more goddamn-it-all-to-fucking-hell script kiddies with escape bytes.  
  
He has seen them before. Dealing with them is part of the job description: it is what he does on weekdays, along with slamming the phone down on idiot Malays with terrible English (or Japanese, or Russian, God forbid, some bastard Filipino) because they do not RTFM, or telling some wannabe white-hat that no, you have not found another bug, and if you persist in being wrong I invite you to push your fixes to your forked branch and see how fast you'll get force-logged out.  
  
Jobs, however, are for the weekdays, and it is Saturday. He has already told Zhukov that he wants server maintenance in two months. The date is earmarked on the calendars of every suit in the fucking Kremlin, and all the way down to the Diet in Tokyo -- and if they press and hold on the date, a list of planned features will grow to fit their calendar display. They have set aside this day, in fact, for a holiday, because all of their hardware straight from Saint Petersburg all the way east to Sapporo will be down and at the mercy of Rowan Hawthorne's keyboard.   
  
And so when they all punch their digi-cards into their terminals the day after, they will expect that anywhere between twenty to a hundred and fifty-six new types of daemons have been added. These men are white-collar drones, and so on average they will only ever encounter six, but this is enough to convince them of the existence of the rest.  
  
Rowan Hawthorne is not under pressure. At deadline, he is free not to commit a single block of code. If he wants, he can simply tell Zhukov that he will need maintenance again in a week. The man will raise his eyebrows, but he will say nothing else and the day will be marked again on calendars stretching from Kiev to the Aleutian islands. The Moscow Exchange will be closed and the value of the ruble will drop zero point one, but none of this will affect Rowan Hawthorne.  
  
There will be an e-mail in his inbox the day after. It will be from the Kremlin; it will address him sternly for his disregard of their political timetables. It does not mean anything. They will continue to fund him because there is no one anywhere from Minsk to Anchorage who can guarantee that a leg will not be severed from their body when they log out of the Virtual Network. And despite the fact that the Russians underpay some ostrich-brained Koreans to deliver the parts he orders (they are two weeks late at the least and do not come in bubble wrap), they will nonetheless make sure that he is otherwise well-equipped.  
  
No such lateness will happen. Rowan Hawthorne will implement one hundred and fifty-six new daemons in the Network's system database on November the sixth. The month after, he will expand Virtual Network service to what remains of the eastern seaboard of the United States.   
  
He is well known for being efficient and on time. But when he is writing the code for a daemon (the seventy-eighth, working name Chillarmy), this is not work -- it is his recreational time, and it is something that he enjoys doing.  
  
This is why, on September the sixth, Rowan Hawthorne is cursing under his breath. Some pimply Japanese teenager in some town in bumfuck nowhere, Japan, has decided today is the day he will attempt to trick the Network into giving him daemon mod privilege.  
  
Bumfuck nowhere, to be precise, is north west north of Nagoya, meaning it is one of those small town shitholes that comprise the territory of the Greater Akihabara Sphere.   
  
Rowan Hawthorne speaks fluent English, Russian, German, Spanish, French, Dutch, Chinese, Urdu, Hindi, Filipino, and -- relevant to this -- Japanese. So he is not sure where in his Terms and Conditions he has not made it clear that all these mini-corporate states do not get to set their own fucking terms of use. When the Russians asked him, a friend, and a bunch of other lesser code-monkeys to write the Network protocol, he took a list of every single state that had signed on to the deal. This way, he has made sure that the Terms are capital-T inviolable; that they loop over, under, and across every relevant stipulation that allows some Korean sweatshop to sell their customers' data to the Chinese.  
  
Rowan is already deciding how long to cut access to about six hundred thousand odd losers -- losers who, in real life, own sweaty, semen-stained pillows with images of naked animé girls drawn on. When their connection is cut, most of them are in sleazy, virtual clubs where the neon, not the alcohol, intoxicates common sense, and where a virtual avatar of their favorite Chinese-cartoon teenage girl is performing the depraved act of their depraved patron's choice.   
  
Because most of these patrons are not at all self-conscious, and the interruption is so unceremonious, a majority of them will immediately fire off death threats into Rowan's inbox. When it happens, it will be the highlight of Rowan's day: it is the kind of incendiary, ingratiate bullshit that is less pathetic than Rowan finds personally vindicating. The reason for this is that the Network is really just lines and lines of server racks, mostly in data centers scattered throughout Japan and Siberia and Eastern Europe -- and they are staffed by the Russian government for the same reason that they are paying Rowan to maintain the Network. This means, in effect, that the Network's Terms and Conditions are in fact Russian law, and accordingly any state that violates it infringes on Russian sovereignty.   
  
Rowan is not sure whether any of these neckbeards grasp that their non-compliance means he is well within his right to call the Kremlin and nuke downtown Tokyo. All the same, he will indulge in reading the e-mails, because they remind him that if patience were the sole criterion for sainthood, he would be the right hand of God.  
  
Reading angry e-mails, unfortunately, will have to wait until this one particular neckbeard is terminated with extreme prejudice and a profoundly vulgar notice is sent to the Akihabara Sphere's sysadmin. On Rowan's screen display, the idiot has -- as with every dumb fuck who has ever tried to log in with an illegal escape byte -- broadcasted his port of entry, blood type, criminal history, and all the other minutiae required to render him into the Virtual Network.   
  
And as with over half of the idiots, this one has decided to log into a public entrypoint.   
  
This is where Rowan would be laughing if he weren't so pissed off. This is how he can tell that he is dealing with garden variety, but nonetheless it is garden variety that has decided to interrupt the creation of prototype daemon number seventy-eight. He decides, given the situation -- shit, what'd be a really good way to tell the sysadmin to go fuck himself? -- that he will have to delegate this to his three sons.  
  
He breathes in, mutters, "Voice message."  
  
A display appears in front of him and his half-built daemon. On it is a flat line, the speech recognizer, which is mostly for show: display or no display, his sons will get the message -- even if he has to un-digitize and do it the old-fashioned way.   
  
"Gavin, Lucas, Clay. Escape byter code zero four three at entry point Verity."  
  
He is about to hit send when another thought crosses his mind.   
  
"Lucas, order pizza for tonight. The usual. And register Clay for me, please."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Welcome to Rowan Hawthorne, thirty-eight years old, and not in the mood for your bullshit. 
> 
> When this update was originally posted, I was having a dilemma as to whether I should work with multiple perspectives or not. You can probably guess what train of thought won out. 
> 
> Rowan's narrative style is influenced, primarily, by Neal Stephenson's excellent Snow Crash. Some people have also commented that he sounds like Terry Pratchett, if Terry Pratchett were an asshole. I don't know about that but I'll take the compliment regardless.


	5. log-in verified

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More definitions for relevant terms can be found by entering the command [man c5.c | less].
> 
> Daemon -- A daemon is a background process not under the control of a user. Similar to ping (Packet INternet Groper), daemon is a "backronym" for Disk And Execution MONitor, reflecting the fact that daemons commonly serve low-level OS processes which are not of interest to their general userbase.
> 
> Client - server interaction -- A server provides a service or function; a client requests said service or function from the server's database. For example, an Internet browser is a client that requests a webpage, and prints the result (if any) provided by the Web server that handles the request for information.
> 
> User permissions -- Files typically have three types of permissions: read (r), allowing a user to view the contents of a file; write (w), allowing a user to modify a file; and execute (x), allowing a user to run a process (if the file is an executable -- for example, a.out or with filetype extension .exe). These permissions are further allotted in groups of threes: owner (file creator, generally), group (users in a predefined group), and world (any user on the system).
> 
> For example, suppose some file note.txt has permissions -rw-r--r--, meaning its owner can read and modify its contents, while other users can only read its contents.

Dad is fine, Rowan says.  
  
"Or papa, or vati, or tatay, or ayah, or otou-san, or pap, or whatever," he says.  
  
I wonder if this is another precaution.  


* * *

  
"What, the Russians?"  
  
Gavin laughs.  
  
"They don't actually _do_ anything, you know," he adds. "Dad is just being, well, you know," and he shrugs.  
  
Breakfast is more of the clay beans. They're drowning in sauce so they taste more like tomato than anything.  
  
They're okay.  
  
"For better or worse," Lucas scoffs.  
  
"You're...still mad at him?" I wonder.  
  
He blinks and looks up at me.  
  
"The Russians, I mean," he says, turning back to glopping more beans out of the bowl. "And _Dad_ is fine, Clay."  
  
Then he jabs aggressively at the mound of food on his plate.  


* * *

  
They're both in a hurry. When Lucas sees me, he drags me along by the arm and leads me wherever the two of them are going.  
  
"Hey, wait--"  
  
"Dad asked me to register you," Lucas interrupts. "I guess that means you got the message too."  
  
Well, I was going to ask.  
  
I mean, I had gotten it. I just didn't know what it was.  
  
"Oh, did he say anything else?" Gavin piped up.  
  
"Pizza for tonight. The usual."  
  
Gavin frowns.  
  
"Gross. Can I at least--"  
  
"Fine," Lucas snaps. "You and your goddamn vanilla Coke."  
  
Gavin does a little fistpump and grins.

* * *

  
"Think of it as on-the-job training--"  
  
is what Lucas says, which I can do, so I nod.  
  
He presses a button, and a light shoots out from where he told me to look straight at and suddenly I am weightless, frozen in place, and my field of vision fades to white.  


* * *

  
Gavin and Lucas are already there when my vision comes back into focus. This is normal, Lucas explains curtly, because it's my first login.  
  
"You get used to it, anyway," Gavin says, same grin from earlier. "Everything turn out okay? Any, uh, headaches?"  
  
We're outside. I can see the night sky and the outlines of buildings in the distance.  
  
We were definitely inside the house when Lucas pressed the button.  
  
"...We're outside," I say. It's not a question. But he takes it as one.  
  
"Well, yes and no," Lucas shrugs. "Virtual space is a hell of a drug."  


* * *

  
I have no idea what a daemon is and Lucas is asking me to pick from three.  
  
The penguin looks cute.  
  
"It's not bad," Gavin says.  
  
"Piplup is shit taste," Lucas immediately snaps.  
  
"You went with a literal _ape._ "  
  
"Bet you're jealous because it suits you more."  
  
I wonder if I've made a mistake.  


* * *

  
What I got from the message and what Lucas explained was that we were tracking some sort of criminal.

But what did I know?  
  
The two of them seem to know what they're doing, at least. We (well, mostly they) -- well, we end up cornering him on a dead-end street.  
  
And he is barely teenage. He is handsome, well-built, and he's wearing a leather jacket I think looks cool.  
  
He is screaming at the three of us in frothing Japanese.  
  
_"Our mother is dead, but thanks anyway,"_ Lucas says, blithely.  
  
_"Probably,"_ Gavin says. ( _"Definitely,"_ Lucas hisses back under his breath.)  
  
I realize then that I understand them when they are talking in Japanese and don't know why.  
  
The boy only gets angrier when Lucas brushes him off. He pulls a small card out of a pocket, brandishes it, and materializes a giant, green monster which looks like it's made of rock.  
  
It roars threateningly at us.  
  
"Revert byte permissions," Gavin says plainly.  
  
There's no animation, no sound for it -- but the titan transforms, in a snap, into a diminuitive beaver.  
  
The boy is cursing. He looks a lot less handsome all of a sudden: his hair is no longer slicked back and cool -- instead it's greasy and spiking in irregular places; and he is wearing a dirty, sweat-stained white shirt with a mural of art on the front of it.  
  
Lucas whistles.  
  
"You want to take that Piplup for a test run, Clay?"  
  
I jump.  
  
"Remember," he says. "On-the job training, right?"


	6. settings/preferences

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More definitions for relevant terms can be found by entering the command [man c6.out | less].
> 
> Suit -- A derogatory term for a bureaucrat. Hackers loathe what they perceive as their mind-numbing, authoritarian idiocy, and as the Jargon File aptly explains: "[a suit is]...invariably worn with a 'tie', a strangulation device that partially cuts off the blood supply to the brain. It is thought that this explains much about the behavior of suit-wearers."
> 
> Stack -- An abstract data type corresponding to a data structure (that is, some method of containing data). The stack's defining property is that data elements within the stack must be accessed in Last In, First Out (LIFO) order -- enforced by a core mechanism of the stack in which direct access is only given to the top element (i.e., the one most recently pushed to the stack). This means that to access the bottom element, it must also be the top element of the stack (i.e., the only element).
> 
> Escape sequence -- A series of characters that change the memory state of a computer interfacing with a data stream. Due to the "tight" syntax of programming languages, a common use of escape sequences is to override the regular purpose of a character normally reserved for the language's syntax.

Later, Lucas throws the boy, roughly, against the steel fencing, _then_ offers him the choice.  
  
_"You could give me your ID,"_ he says, again in Japanese, _"or we could do this the hard way."_  
  
The boy answers in broken English.  
  
"White pig no know hard," he sputters. "It like their dick."  
  
So Lucas kicks him between the legs.  
  


* * *

  
"Watch this," Gavin says. "It's really cool."  
  
When he says this he's showing me the ID card we nicked off the boy's wallet.  
  
The boy is still groaning on the curb.  
  
I'm not sure if I'm supposed to feel bad for him or not. ("Don't," says Lucas. But I'm still not sure.)  
  
What Gavin does next doesn't take very long, apart from when he presses down on the image of the boy's face on the card -- which brings up a screen display hanging in front of us. On it is a lot of detail, which I think is about the boy, like "blood type A" or "length of member: 2 in.".  
  
I think it's excessive, but I'm probably wrong, because I didn't make it.  
  
Gavin nudges me with his shoulder to make sure I'm paying attention, so I do, and I'm glad I do, because he's right -- it's cool.  
  
He swipes from the left of the display, and everything on it flows right and off the screen, which disappears now that it's blank.  
  
Gavin nudges me again, gestures with his head at the boy, who disintegrates into a stream of zeroes and ones that float into the sky and vanish.  
  
"Cool, right?"  
  
"Yeah," I say. "I think it's pretty cool."  
  


* * *

  
Lucas is the engineer, and Gavin the programmer. This is how they describe themselves to me over pizza.  
  
"Dad had to drag us to one of the Russians' parties, once," Gavin says. "But they couldn't tell you the difference between us if they tried."  
  
Then he uncaps the bottle of vanilla Coke, glugs, and Lucas picks up the story.  
  
"So Dad gave up and introduced us to one of them as his left and right hands," he says.  
  
"It's an easy way to put it," Rowan interjects. "In any case, he left us alone after that."

* * *

  
Gavin spends a lot of the next few weeks showing me around the Network, dragging me out of bed or prying me away from a book every time he does.  
  
"You can name the Piplup, actually," he explains, once.  
  
I call him Edmond. I read the books of whoever used to live in my room -- in one of them, there is something called the "Edmonds-Karp max-flow algorithm", which says it computes the maximum flow in a flow network.  
  
And when I read it I think, _Don't penguins swim in water?_ So I think it sounds about right.  
  


* * *

  
The week after that, Gavin produces a card like the boy did when the giant came out of nowhere.  
  
The word he uses for it is _bind_. As in, I'm supposed to _bind_ the data of a daemon to a card.  
  
It doesn't sound nice.  
  
"It's jargon," he shrugs. "Jargon doesn't mean anything."  
  
The card he is showing me now is that of the same beaver Lucas wanted me to get rid of.  
  
"Bidoof," Gavin says. "Although Dad calls them _bogos_ , they're so useless."  
  
But didn't he code them in?, I wonder. Gavin hands me the card.  
  
"So if they're useless--"  
  
"Well, you could probably delete them, if you wanted to," he says. "But--"  
  
There's a button in the corner of the card that says X.  
  
"Like this?" I ask.  
  
"Yeah, like -- wait."  
  
There is a tinny sound, like a pop, surprising me, and then the card is blank.  
  
"Clay," he says.  
  
Like that, I guess.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The boys may sound a bit racist, but I'm fairly sure it's only as much as they need to enforce the rules.


	7. branch and link address

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More definitions for relevant terms can be found by entering the command [man c7.out | less].
> 
> Cryptocurrency -- Decentralized digital currency. As the definition implies, it has no central holdings such as banks or reserves, and all transactions are verified by a publicly-operated digital ledger known as the blockchain. This verification is done in a process known as mining -- owing to the manual (and thus time-consuming nature) of this process, miners who correctly verify blocks of transaction data and add them to the blockchain are given financial incentive by way of cryptocurrency imbursement.
> 
> Big O notation -- A mathematical notation used by computer scientists to analyze the worst-case scenario for how long a given program will run. As a general rule of thumb, anything after linear time (that is, O(N) -- read as O of N) tends to be ridiculously inefficient, as current computing trends imply computers will evolve to be tasked to operate on massive data sets, where run-time tends to balloon if it is anything more than linear, or in some cases, n log n.
> 
> ping -- Software utility measuring response time on a network, frequently used by online gamers to determine lag -- it determines the time taken for a message to be sent to and from a target location. It is a backronym for Packet INternet Groper, although its name was originally derived from sonar echo-location.

What Rowan doesn't understand is why, after the end of the world, Roark is still _fucking_ mining bitcoins.  
  
Roark van der Linden is twenty-four, summa cum laude of MIT's graduating class of twenty-seventy-six, and unlike a thousand odd wannabees trying to kiss Rowan's ass for the privilege of becoming a Network dev, regularly commits bug-fixes worth pushing to the Network protocol.   
  
But he is fucking mining bitcoins.   
  
Rowan is only thirty-eight, himself. But he imagines that in ten years, he will suffer a stroke while on the line with some protozoan of a Korean, formerly the northern variety, trying to configure a Network server. He will wake up two weeks later with locked-in syndrome, and write a best-selling memoir of his life by blinking once (and occasionally, twice) out of his left eye to a busty Afro-German interpreter who is deaf out of her right ear and speaks double the languages he can.  
  
The interpreter's pencil tucked between her breasts, Rowan wil begin to narrate. Progress will be slow, because on the first day, they will try to establish an unwritten ruleset. For example, she will not yet know that he prefers to blink once to say "yes"; he will not yet know that she would prefer to write in French rather than German. But nonetheless, he will narrate the firebombing of Hokkaidō in full that day before the clock strikes six and the nurse feeds him through a tube.  
  
On days two, six, and thirty-three, he will talk about the Russians.  
  
The one thing he will emphasize then, above everything else -- is that apart from winning wars, the Russians are fucking useless.   
  
The Russians, of course, win wars, because they are the good guys, they are fighting for freedom and democracy and the same old bullcrap like big old Uncle fucking Sam used to do, and more often than not, the good guys tend to win. But Rowan Hawthorne's job has never been and will never be about who happens to have more warheads at any given point in human history. Either way, the winner will hire him to write the Network protocol, and this is what the Russians did on the seventh of August twenty-sixty-six.   
  
It was a Saturday evening.   
  
He told them to either pay him double or fuck off. They did triple (bunch of suckers), so he downed a bottle of Pepsi and got to work.  
  
The frame of the Network protocol took Rowan twenty-six days to write, he will say. The rest, he follows, was seven days of drawing graphics, whereupon he imagines some Algerian or Aldastani literature professor with a cock down his fucking larynx will presume (entirely wrongly) he is trying to make an arrogant comparison to the Judeo-Christian notion of God.   
  
And this is where Rowan Hawthorne interrupts himself and returns to the present, because a thought comes out of nowhere and says _Roark could do it in seventy-three days_.  
  
This is the kind of thought that pisses off Rowan. Seventy-three days is useless fucking shit trash; when the lives of displaced Nipponese housewives and their dogs and their innocent teenage sons and daughters who work as voice actors and idols are on your deadline, seventy-three days is like showing up three (sometimes four or six) hours late, every day, and defending this with several variations on a lie about a Boy Scout helping an Alzheimer's patient cross the road.   
  
It would not bother Rowan at all if Roark was the type to never break less than seventy-three, but he is not. Roark van der Linden is the type of kid whose report cards say he is bright and talented and has a future and all that saccharine crap, but also that he is an unmotivated little snot, and that he needs to work on his people skills.   
  
Roark van der Linden, if Rowan could get through to him, could do under twenty-four days, graphics included.   
  
But instead he is fucking mining bitcoins.  
  
This is why on September the twenty-fourth, Rowan is irritable yet again -- Roark has sent him an e-mail. Though he would like to think that the kid finally wants to learn at his feet, he knows before he listens to it that the contents are strictly otherwise. And so, Rowan prefers to keep Roark out of his short-term memory.  
  
The speech recognizer expands to size in front of him, and relays the message.  
  
"Rowan, something crazy's happening on my side of the pond. Long story short -- slowdown over the fucking joint. Ping is three-twenty, I'm not shitting you, something is eating my goddamn resources like I don't fuckin' know. Usual diagnostics, nothing. Need your help."  
  
 _Blip._ The display folds in on itself and disappears.  
  
This, however, is new.  
  
There is a difference between Roark, the person, and Roark, the programmer, one that Rowan is careful to keep in mind. It is that the former is irredeemable trash; the latter is worth taking seriously.   
  
If there is a problem that Roark van der Linden cannot fix, then in Rowan's head, there is a problem.  
  
And so, for the first time in fifteen years, Rowan Hawthorne takes something seriously.  
  
"Voice message," he says. Display comes back to life. "Gavin, Lucas, Clay. Virtual office, meeting, ten minutes. And -- drop whatever you're doing, Lucas."


	8. process starvation

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More definitions for relevant terms can be found by entering the command [man c8.out | less]. To jump to the definition of a specific term, enter [(term) | man c8.out | less].
> 
> Operating system -- Software which integrates computer hardware and software resources into an organized structure; provides common services required by computer programs to run. Often abbreviated to OS.
> 
> Scheduling -- The process by which an OS assigns tasks to processes suitable to complete said tasks. In practice, the OS has limited memory, and must therefore budget the allocation of memory to processes of differing length of execution, size of memory usage, as well as of competing priority. Several levels of scheduling exist -- for example: short-term scheduling directly adds processes to the execution queue, and medium-term scheduling can temporarily remove wasteful processes (i.e., those that use excessive memory, or those waiting too long on another process to respond) from the queue.
> 
> Dispatching -- Granting access to the CPU during scheduling. Generally, some other process will have been using the CPU beforehand; a dispatcher initiates what is known as a context switch to grant another process use of the CPU.
> 
> Starvation -- Denying a process the necessary resources or memory required to execute. Scheduling, as a process, must be designed to combat process starvation in some way so that all processes are eventually allowed to execute on the system.

"So what's the difference between that boy and some bogo?" is what I said. But that was after the fact.  
  
It turns out there's a lot of differences. But Gavin doesn't like being mean, so then, I think a lot of those differences must come off as being mean. The one he ends up telling me about is the time Rowan grounded him for pressing the button on a Metagross.  
  
(A Metagross turns out to be a supercomputer on feet. So I end up wondering why Rowan has designed a walking computer inside a computer.)  
  
"To put it another way," he says, "the Metagross took Dad a lot of time to make."  
  
But isn't Dad an admin?, I wonder.  
  
"Sure," Gavin shrugs, "but he didn't cheat."  
  
"So the boy did."  
  
"Pretty much, yeah."  


* * *

  
Lucas is fairly reliable.  
  
When he says to give him a minute, he takes a minute.  
  
Then he takes a minute. Then he takes a minute.  
  
On accident, Dad has forgotten to put "Lucas" at the _front_ of the message this time, because he has to tell _just_ Lucas not to take a minute. At least, when it happens, I don't have to ask Gavin why.  


* * *

  
Dad says ten minutes, but it takes shorter, because Roark is supposed to talk with us live and instead he is sending us still frames of himself. So Dad turns off the display and says, "We're going."  


* * *

  
When we get there, Roark tells us he has _localized_ the problem. (But I thought -- wasn't this already his local problem?)  
  
"It's the mine," he explains. "Some asshole is in there; he's using up all the bandwidth."  
  
So, I think, we're going into the mine.  
  
He continues. "So obviously I tried killing his session."  
  
"Obviously it didn't work," Dad interrupts, "or I wouldn't be here."  
  
Roark shrugs. "You're welcome to try."


	9. denial-of-service

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More definitions for relevant terms can be found by entering the command [c9.exe | less]. To jump to the definition of a specific term, enter [(term) | man c9.exe | less].
> 
> kill -- A command-line utility that sends signals to running processes. kill does not necessarily terminate processes, despite the name -- but this being said, its default signal terminates processes, hence the name. A common argument used to invoke kill is the option -9, which signifies an unconditional process kill (that is, it cannot be blocked or interrupted).
> 
> General use case: kill [arguments] [process_id]
> 
> Hello world -- A fundamental computer program with a singular purpose: display the string "Hello, world!" according to the specifications of a target programming language. Designed to demonstrate basic language syntax. An extended example can be found in the glossary.

_Bullshit_ , is what Rowan thinks when Roark says the words. "You're welcome to try" -- really? What the fuck does this guy think Rowan is? The Middle Eastern tech support team at Best Buy with their hands scrambling down the fucking customer service manual? Christ.  
  
And so _bullshit_ is also what Rowan thinks when he types _kill_ and -- to his genuine surprise -- nothing happens.  
  
Rowan Hawthorne has only ever been wrong thrice (twice?) since the words _hello, world!_ first flashed on his screen. But this is not what pisses him off about the command line printing the equivalent of a big, fat, ASCII-rendered middle finger -- rather, it's the thought that somewhere in that virtual mine is some asshole who has managed to block a kill signal.  
  
In other words, there's some dipshit in the mine who thinks he's better than Rowan.  
  
On the Network, those are famous last thoughts.  


* * *

  
"Why is there a mine here, anyway?" Lucas asks the moment they walk in.  
  
Something goes _click_ in Rowan's head when he hears this. To think he was wondering why the fuck his son did dumb shit like skip town for scrap metal.  
  
"Do I look like God to you?" he asks.  
  
"I mean," Lucas says, shrugging, "if you're God, I'm basically an atheist."  
  
"There's your answer," Rowan snaps. "There's a mine here because there's a mine out there. Honestly, son."  
  
Behind them, Roark turns to Clay, gives him a look like _is this an everyday thing?_ And Clay nods.  
  
Rowan pretends not to notice.  


* * *

  
The asshole is using one of those grainy, black-and-white avatars that makes Roark's video call feed look like sixty frames of Adonis per second. This is how Rowan realizes he is dealing with a serious motherfucker -- low-grade avatars are what any actual attacker will use, so that their system is not wasting resources trying to render their pale, malnourished faces.  
  
It's Roark who mouths the words--  
  
"The _fuck._ "  
  
_The fuck_ is right. The asshole is using a 461 -- a Weavile -- to break the encryption on--  
  
Wait.  
  
What the fuck is he breaking the encryption on?  
  
"Roark," Rowan snarls. "the hell did you hide in here?"  
  
"My system key," Roark breathes. "Son of a bitch."  
  
He curses again under his breath, pulls a handful of daemon cards out of his coat pocket. Materializes a 76 and a 409.  
  
"Rockslide!"  
  
The daemons slam their feet on the ground in unison. On cue, rocks spill out of the ceiling right over the attacker's head. They aren't actually caving in the mine, the daemons -- the attack just does that, makes rocks drop on something out of thin virtual air.  
  
The asshole just snaps his fingers.  
  
It happens without so much as a _blip_ \-- the rocks are gone.  
  
And then the Golem and the Rampardos are facing the other way. They are staring down Rowan and his entourage.  


* * *

  
"Don't tell me none of my kids brought their daemons," Rowan says, backing up. The rest of them follow.  
  
"Like hell I did," Gavin says.  
  
Rowan understands this to mean _sure, but do I look like I want my shit stolen?_ He sighs anyway.  
  
"Revert permissions," Rowan says.  
  
For the second time today, nothing happens.  
  
Behind them, almost indistinguishable in the bitrate, the attacker cracks a smile.  
  
"Rockslide."  
  
Rowan braces for impact.

* * *

  
They haven't been force-logged out yet.  
  
A Rockslide takes 1.63 seconds and it's been 3.91.  
  
Rowan opens his eyes.

And he blinks.  
  
Hand stretched out, Clay Hawthorne is holding the Rockslide in mid-air.


	10. 403 forbidden

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (This is part 2 of the previous chapter and was originally posted as one update.)

The rocks show up over our heads and the instinct manifests.  
  
Fear? Reflex? Both? I don't know. But the nerves are buzzing in my head again and I can feel the sparks going off in my blood vessels and I don't _know_ why -- but I'm holding up the rocks above us with a hand out.   
  
The words that say _you know how to do this_ stream through my head like they've always been there and all I can think is _what do I do?_  
  
The words don't say anything back. Can't say anything back.  
  
The sprite is staring at us -- at _me_ \-- in shock, like I've done something wrong.   
  
I know that face. I can't put a finger on it.  
  
But the memory flashes into my head all the same, stone-cold face staring down at me, perfectly rendered, and I remember that I said the words--  
  
"I can't do this."  
  
and I lose focus. The rocks tumble to the ground around us.  
  
The sprite hears a pinging sound and recovers from shock. And then it vanishes.  
  
The daemons lose their aggressive stance.   
  
And I turn around, see everyone's faces staring at me again.  
  
 _Did I do something wrong?_


	11. refactoring

_How_ is the word they use for it, fingers pointed and voices raised.  
  
_How_ feels like being socked in the gut.  
  
I bury my face, red-hot, in my hands, try to mute the sound -- but they keep spilling through the cracks where my fingers are uneven, and they end up hurting all the same.  
  
That moment the rocks fell on us, I remember knowing I could stop them. I remember knowing I was doing something impossible.  
  
I wish I knew how to put this all on mute.  
  


* * *

  
Roark leaves the office in a huff, Gavin and Lucas following when Dad says, "Issue him the goddamn system key so he shuts the fuck up."  
  
And then it hits me, blood draining, that Dad has left me alone in the room.  
  


* * *

  
_Root access_ is the phrase he uses -- says I have it; wonders how I have it.  
  
"Look at this," he says.  
  
He pulls up a screen -- the same screen Gavin did on the boy who cheated two weeks ago.  
  
Except it's mine.  
  
"...Look at what?"  
  
"Exactly," Dad says. "Nothing. Everything's normal. You're a normal human being. I don't understand, Clay."  
  
_Human_ is the word that sticks out to me. Almost like--  
  
"What were you expecting, Dad?"  
  
He purses his lips, rolls the words around in them like he's not sure how it won't hurt.  
  
"Nothing. Stupid thought. Only humans can get into the Network."  
  
Dad didn't strike me as the kind to have stupid thoughts.  
  
"I mean," he interrupts himself, "you could trick the Network into thinking you were a human. But then again -- not possible."  
  
"Not possible -- why, exactly?"  
  
He looks away, through the glass windows of the office and into the virtual city below.  
  
"Who do you think wrote this city?"  
  


* * *

  
It dawns on me that the reason we'd wiped the boy out of the Network was because Dad didn't like the impossible.  
  
I had just done something impossible.  
  
I tell Dad what I'm thinking. His eyebrows rise, then they don't -- he sighs, scrunches them, sighs again.  
  
"Clay," he starts, finally. "You're still wondering why I took you in."  
  
I had been. I still was.  
  


* * *

  
Alyssa (but he called her Aly) Hawthorne had a smile, Dad says, that he could never have rendered into the Network. The reasons were two-fold: the first, he had just said -- that he didn't know a programming language that could draw it like she could do, without so much as a semi-colon.  
  
The second was matter-of-fact. When Lucas was born, Dad had been twenty-two. She walked out on him two months after that.  
  


* * *

  
Palmer Martinez was twenty-six when the Americans bombed him and his house along with the rest of Juneau.  
  
When they did, Dad said Gavin Martinez had been busy catching fever on Dad's bed.  
  


* * *

  
Dad pegs me for about sixteen, which he thinks is funny because Gavin thinks of me as a younger brother.  
  
But he doesn't say anything about himself, up until I ask.  
  
He deflects the question anyway.  
  
"You didn't have anywhere to go, Clay," he says. "So you weren't going anywhere."  
  
And then he shrugs.  
  
"The Russians pay me, anyway. It's something I can afford."  
  


* * *

  
The topic turns to the man in grainy white, and it's then that Rowan says I'm worth more than just being the son.  
  
When he says this, he materializes a hologram of something he must have been working on (was it a daemon?), plucks it out of the air, hands it to me, says, "Here."  
  
He calls it a Cinccino. (So it must be a daemon.) In my hands, the thing is soft to the touch. But I'm not sure what it means.  
  
"Think of it as a good-luck charm, alright?"  
  
_For what?_  
  
Dad is good at reading my mind, normally. But instead of answering, he just turns away, maybe hoping that I will know what to do.  
  
I don't.  
  
"...Dad," I start, shoving the nerves back down into my throat. "I don't know how."  
  
And this is when he looks me straight in the eyes. But then he swallows; doesn't say anything.  
  
My fingers curl tighter around the plush.  
  


* * *

  
I lie awake in bed that night, the memory bubbling up and down in my head as I stare miles into the ceiling.  
  
The face isn't clear anymore like it was in the heat of the moment. It's flickering, it's grainy, and my head is doing that best-job bad-job thing again that makes me hate it.  
  
The only thing I can remember clearly is that I said it, keep saying it over and over in my head--  
  
_I can't do this._  
  
"But I have to," I breathe.  
  
And that's the thought that scares me.

I roll over in the sheets, and try to dream.

But I can't.


	12. busy-loop

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Further definitions can be found by piping [assist -a c2.1 | less].
> 
> Busy-waiting
> 
> Occurs when a process repeatedly checks to see if something has occurred (in jargon: if a condition is true). This process can then be said to be waiting for another busy process to complete. While this is a valid technique used in implementing multi-processing or parallel processing systems (that is, systems where processes run concurrently, as well as use and operate the same memory data store), it is generally considered a waste of system resources -- time used busy-waiting should and often can be used for a different task.
> 
> Dijkstra's shortest-path algorithm
> 
> A method for finding the shortest possible route between points. Given a starting point, it evaluates all routes to an endpoint, and as it goes, it also evaluates routes to intermediate points, updating its information if a shorter path than previously discovered to a point is found later. The original variant of Dijkstra's algorithm is given a starting point AND the end-point it is required to find, but common modern variants choose only a starting point and allow the algorithm to find the shortest route to all other points. The running time of Dijkstra's algorithm is quadratic related to the number of points it evaluates (that is, squared), which does not make it a particularly attractive solution if another, more efficient algorithm could be used instead.
> 
> Agile software development
> 
> A development paradigm asserting the need for rapid and flexible response to changes in project requirements or specifications, under which results must be delivered early, correctly -- and evolve accordingly as the problem or solution becomes more complex. As far as programming is concerned, agile development demands that each step of software creation must be correct before further steps are developed -- a principle which makes it easier to isolate, identify, and fix errors that arise, since errors will always be found in the most recent step.

_"Busy,"_ is all Dad says about it.   
  
It hits me then that today is going to be different. _How_ I don't know; _why_ only sort of.  
  
I was asking about Gavin. Seven AM until -- is today the twenty-sixth? -- he drags me out of bed and into the Network, although he only dragged me by the arm the first week. The rest, I just followed him there. Breakfast came later, somewhere around nine.   
  
Breakfast comes first today, looks like.

* * *

  
I'm still not good with remembering names. I figure this has to do with the fact that I started out not remembering anything at all, which means I probably wasn't good at it in the first place.   
  
Even then, Dad says I should try to remember these ones.   
  
But then there are eight, no -- _nine_ of them. Before they even start milling around and shaking hands and giving me smiles and names I'm already nervous about the "remembering" part, but --   
  
\-- but he said I should at least _try._  
  
I swallow.  
  
Okay.  
  
_Roark_ , I already know -- I saw him yesterday. Right.  
  
 _Gardeniya_ , she says, (I think she means Gardenia?) -- that's new, _Sumomo_ \-- must be Japanese.   
  
_¡Hola!_ , another one says, is that his name? No, must be Spanish, calls himself _Mananti_ , no, was it Volker? Volkner? or Byron?   
  
I can't do this.  
  


* * *

  
Dad says it again. Root access.   
  
I can feel seven people staring.  
  


* * *

  
Dad pulls me aside later when they leave. I think he knows I wasn't paying attention -- I mean -- look, they were _staring._  
  
"I know," he says.   
  
So he gives me the short of it -- first, he says, remember that guy you saved us from?   
  
Sure.   
  
Dad says he thinks the man is after them. ("They all have admin keys," he says about the _why._ That makes sense.)  
  
"Did you get their names?" he asks.  
  
The lump starts in my throat again.  
  
"Goddamnit."  
  


* * *

  
Second, Dad says -- the idea is that since I'm the only _other_ person who can do what _he_ did, I would need to do it better than him. This is why he says he'll make me any daemon I need -- except that he is busy with work, and making new ones (I ask him what ones? -- "Daemons, obviously,") -- so he says he will have to fit me in the schedule. He also says it takes him a bit to make the one I want, so I can only get one every time I come and ask.   
  
Thursday, he says, always works. A second later he remembers it's Thursday, so I scramble -- and realize I don't actually know a lot of the daemons, apart from the bogos. And the Piplup. ( _Shit_ \-- what did I name it?)  
  
But I think Dad would know them, right? So I ask him to pick.  
  
"Just this once," he says.  
  


* * *

  
 _Dijkstra_ \-- it sounds like a hard name to say until Lucas points out that the J is more like a Y. ("The Dutch are weird," he adds onto it, and shrugs. But what do the Dutch have to do with this?)  
  
It's what I want to name the Crobat (although Dad called it a 169 until I asked him what that was) -- because it turns out to move really fast. I read about it in the same book I read about Edmond: there's a Dijsktra algorithm too, says it finds the shortest path to another point. So it's a fast algorithm, which means it fits.  
  
I spend the rest of the morning with Lucas. He takes me to hunt down a few more of the kids like the Japanese one who had a cool jacket ("Escape byters," he says), and shows me a few more things about Dijkstra and Edmond while I use them -- usually to pin one of the kids against a wall, before he wipes them out of the Network like Gavin did.   
  
The big thing is that I find out how to pull up their screens -- you know, like off my ID.   
  
There's a lot of stuff on the screens that still goes over my head. Lucas says he'll explain them later.  
  
Gavin probably would've explained now.  
  


* * *

  
Speaking of Gavin --   
  
He was back! He came back at around noon, Dad says, and he's bouncing around the room now and fistpumping and grinning like he's gotten to order Vanilla Coke again.  
  
He's holding a card in his hand.  
  
"Look at it -- Dad, look at it, I did it -- driver's license -- nailed it, fucking finally, did it, did it --"  
  
"Like that's hard on an empty road," Lucas says.  
  
"Hey," Gavin says. "There were people, FYI--"  
  
"What, on the sidewalk?"  
  
"On the ROAD--"  
  
"Lucas," Dad interrupts. "Leave your brother alone." And then he ruffles Gavin's hair -- hand on his shoulder so he stays in place for a second -- says, "Proud of you. Listen -- pizza? Anywhere you want. My treat."  
  
I didn't know it was possible for Gavin's eyes to light up like _that_ , because in the first place they were already lit.  
  
"Wait," Lucas says. "is _he_ driving?"  
  
Dad stares at him.  
  
"What the fuck do you think?"


	13. breach

Gavin is frowning at me.  
  
"It's _cold_ out, you know--" by which he means the jacket I'm wearing when he sees it.   
  
At first, I thought -- did I look bad? But, no, it's the same jacket I like wearing over the same sweater: gray over a nice, mute cerulean. And, I mean --   
  
"It's not really that cold," I wager. "Besides, aren't you driving? So -- so that means I don't really need to stay outside that long. If it really is cold, I mean."  
  
He curls the expression on his face tighter. Loosens it with a sigh.   
  
And then -- he unrolls the scarf around his neck!  
  
"Just wear this, at least."  
  
I take a corner of it in my hand before realizing. "...don't you need this?"   
  
He rolls his eyes.  
  
"I mean, I guess it's not that cold out."  
  


* * *

  
The first memory I have is of waking up on a cracked and broken highway. So when Gavin is on the city streets and it doesn't look anywhere near as bad -- not even the buildings -- that's the confusing part. But Dad explains it like this.   
  
"There are -- or, well, there were several species of humans that came before us," he begins. "But the one that survived is the reason most of my face is not driven back slanted into my skull. And the reason for that, I think, is because _homo sapiens_ decided that a cave would be better than an open road." And I sort of get that -- and don't.   
  
Before I can ask him again, there is a pothole. "Goddamnit!" Lucas screams in the back. "Gavin--"  
  
"Pothole," I find myself saying, having been thrust forward and then lurched back into the leather seat. "That was a pothole."  
  
"I was about to say," Gavin said. "Chill."  
  


* * *

  
"Give me the names, again," Lucas says. "You need to start remembering this stuff."  
  
I begin.   
  
"Edmond," ("--which is?" Lucas asks.) "394. So that's a Prinplup." ("Huh," he says. "Already?" "Yeah.")  
  
Then there is Dijkstra. 169. Over the next few weeks -- Boyer, 68. Turing -- he's a 65. Or a 64? Listen, I'm only just getting the hang of this. And, uh -- Shannon. That's 176. Most of the names, I forget _why_ , having had to trade that part of my memory for what the names represent, not what they _mean_. But mostly, they are the daemons that the escape byters use -- there are a lot, but those are the ones that look the coolest. And half of the time, I spend the first thirty minutes in Dad's room waving wildly with my hands because it's hard to describe what they looked like _after_ the fact.  
  
And then Lucas stops me. "You're forgetting one," he says.   
  
Did I? "Fulkerson," he says.   
  
"Oh," I say.  
  
He's right. But Fulkerson, well, (and I think it was 129) --  
  
"I mean, he looks kind of like a bogo," I say, frowning. Not really at the fact that I'd forgotten. Just -- more like, _when_ did I get him? So, I mean, how could I remember something I didn't even know in the first place?  
  
Lucas crosses his arms and sighs. "And?"  
  
 _...And what?_   
  
...What am I supposed to say?   
  


* * *

  
This hadn't been the first time, either. There was that other time, two weeks ago, where Dad caught me in the middle of a book.  
  
"Clay," he says first. But he was looking angry. I don't remember a lot of the words he used. But it was about Shannon, or something. I think what he said was that I had changed some configuration, so that instead of the body being down-like and feathery, every 176 had had hard, eggshell-like bodies polished smooth for the past half hour or so after I'd logged off.   
  
It must have been the root access thing. But I hadn't noticed -- and Shannon felt kind of ticklish. And I kind of thought that doing it was fine, but -- but then Dad was yelling at me.  
  
When he stopped, he was still staring at me. Like I was supposed to say something. And like now, with Lucas, I wondered. I'm still wondering.  
  
What was I supposed to say?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wrote this and then realized it was mostly a fluff chapter. Oh well.


	14. worst-first search

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Further definitions can be found by piping [assist -a c2-3 | less].
> 
> On graph theory
> 
> A graph describes objects that are related to one another. A common example would be cities (a node, or point) related together by a road connecting them (an edge, or line). Graphs may be undirected, meaning that the relation goes two ways, or directed, meaning that relations are one-way unless the relation is specifically defined for both directions; they are also described as dense or sparse depending on the number of edges that connect points in graphs together. Points in a graph that are related are called adjacent; the groups of edges that connect two points together are called paths.
> 
> Trees
> 
> Trees are graphs where all points can only be connected by at most one path. In computer science, the most common application of a tree is as a data structure (a method of storing data) called a binary tree -- in which each point branches down to a maximum of two nodes called children. In combination with some set of rules on data stored at each point in a tree (for example, each point must have a higher value stored in it than any of its children -- this would be called a binary max-heap, for example), binary trees are used to implement efficient methods of sorting and searching for data.
> 
> Huffman prefix-code tree compression
> 
> A method of lossless data compression (that is, the data can be decompressed to perfectly re-create the original information). The algorithm does this by counting how often a certain bit of information occurs in data to be compressed -- encoding the most frequently-occurring data with fewer bits, and the less frequent likewise with more bits. This data is stored in a binary tree, which is sorted from the bottom up to guarantee correctness. Thus, a prefix-code tree representing compressed data is an example of a binary max-heap.
> 
> For example: if a text file contains the character 'e' most often, it might be compressed and represented by a singular bit 0. Meanwhile, if a character '4' occurred far less frequently, it might be represented by the longer encoding 10011.
> 
> Best-first search
> 
> A searching method that investigates, according to a specified ruleset, what it believes to be the most promising point(s) in a graph leading towards a destination. It is an example of a greedy algorithm -- meaning that, if not optimized (an example of an optimized method is A* search), pure best-first search may lead to inefficient results.

Gardenia -- she's wringing her hands raw.  
  
Maybe she's hoping the words will come out of them. They don't, and we get nowhere.  
  
"Where the fuck are your daemons?" Dad snaps.  
  
She swallows.  
  
" _He_ has them."  
  
The rest of the words spill out of her, wounded, after that.  
  


* * *

  
"Listen," Lucas had said, the other day -- the one where he'd tried to get me to remember names. "What do you have in common with him?"  
  
It hadn't been a question that was supposed to take too long to answer -- but that was what I ended up doing. The thing was, I'd tried not to think about him.  
  
I keep trying not to think about him.  
  
"He can _cheat_ ," I'd said. "We both can."  
  
"And no one else can," he added. "So it has to be you."  
  
_Wait._  
  
"No one else...?"  
  
Lucas had sighed.  
  
"Dad made sure he couldn't. Not if he wanted to."  
  


* * *

  
"What the _fuck,_ " Gavin breathes.  
  
And, I mean -- the building looked small from the outside.  
  
I can see Gavin stealing a few glances behind -- I think he's trying to see if the exit isn't _that_ far, maybe he can double-check. And he might have -- Dad and Lucas aren't here anymore -- except that Gardenia's already giving him a look.  
  
But I look anyway, too. And I can't see the exit behind us, either.  
  
Ahead of us, the platforms float listlessly, an archipelago of infinite branches stretching out into virtual space.  
  
"Gardenia--" Gavin says.  
  
"Vhat?" she snaps, her irritation thicker than her accent.  
  
"How are we supposed to find him in here?"  
  
"How vas I supposed to know dipshit vould even try?" she retorts. "Besides, there is _you_ \--"  
  
and she _looks_ at me, looks like she is expecting something magic.  
  
A jolt runs up my spine and the memory flashes again.  
  
_I can't do this_  
  
and with the memory comes a jolt of anger, fists clenched--  
  
"I'm not a miracle worker!"  
  
They both jump.  
  
I jump.  
  
None of us know what to say, until I do.  
  
"Gavin," I say, and start walking. "Come on."  
  
I can feel blood rushing to my face when I pass them. 

 

* * *

  
Hours pass.  
  
The platforms start to become so many that we don't have to jump across gaps anymore. They pack together like molecules and squish against each other like mallows.  
  


* * *

  
The first thing that happens is that a ball of energy whizzes past -- just nearly misses us --  
  
and there the sprite is, face garbled and blank and still and cold.  
  
"Vhere the hell are my daemons?" Gardenia snarls, and Gavin looks at me and we both realize it at the same time -- she's right.  
  
The _thing_ in front of us -- it doesn't look like a 407 or a 421.  
  
Instead we are facing down something different -- it looks like a jackal -- but blue, and black, and spiked on the back of its palms. And on two feet. And in a fighting stance.  
  
"Aurrrrrr-rr-rrrrrra Spppherr-r-r-r-r-rrrrrre," the sprite screeches, and Gardenia and Gavin back away, and I reach for my cards, brandish them. Out something comes -- Dijkstra, and there's no time to think --  
  
"Wing Attack!"  
  
The Crobat rushes, zigzags towards the jackal -- and the sphere follows it!  
  
But when it collides, denting a wing, nothing seems to happen, nothing until Dijkstra collides with the jackal thing and knocks it almost to the edge of the platform.  
  
The sprite backs off in laggard steps that distort the space around it.  
  
"Mee-t-tttt-t-t-t-ttal Clll-l-l-llaw."  
  
"Wing Attack again!"  
  
This time, both Dijkstra and the jackal lunge. I'm not sure what happens first -- Dijkstra hitting, or getting hit -- but all the same, the jackal is knocked by the slap, arcing, into the air, and my Crobat meets ground, landing on the wing where the jackal scratched him.  
  
The jackal lands with a thud and doesn't get up. Just as quickly, it disintegrates into a trail of bits that float up and away.  
  
But Dijkstra picks himself up, in front of the sprite, and it backs into a corner. We follow, inching him into a box.  
  
"I ask again," Gardenia says. "Vhere are my daemons?"  
  
The sprite doesn't cow any more.  
  
"RrrRrrrrRRRight heere."  
  
The movement is quick -- almost too quick -- and suddenly, sure enough, there's a 407, a Roserade, standing in front of the sprite like a shield.  
  
"Stunsporr-rrrre."  
  
We're too close. The powder blasts out of its hands like a firework, and before we can get our bearings -- we can't. I try to mouth something, try to will myself free of my body freezing -- can't I do that, come on, come ON, Dijkstra is right THERE --  
  
"Sleep Powdeerrr-r-r-rrrrr."  
  
_Bang._  
  
I blank out.


	15. multithreaded search

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For help, type [assist -a c2-4 | less].
> 
> On parallelism
> 
> Serial algorithms solve problems step-by-step using a single process to do work; in contrast, parallel algorithms are designed so that several processes can handle a problem at the same time, and solve a problem faster. Generally, parallelism is described as being either task- or data-oriented, as follows:
> 
> Task parallelism breaks up the steps of a problem solution; separate processes are given different parts of the solution to work on. Take an assembly line in a factory as an example: one machine, for example, is given the task of evenly cutting up wooden blocks, which are then sent to another machine, which dyes and varnishes them, and so on. Except at the start, when there are no cut blocks ready to dye and varnish, one will notice that since both machines are simultaneously generating output, the work is being done efficiently.
> 
> Data parallelism distributes the data to be worked on between separate processes all doing the same thing. Take for example the check-out lines at a supermarket: all cashiers have the same job (processing customers' purchases) and distribute customers more or less evenly amongst themselves. To understand the difference between this and a serial solution, consider this: how long would it take one cashier at one check-out line to process all customers alone?

The world never ends all at once.  
  
When Dad said this, I believed him, though now I don't know why I do. But what he said was this: _that_ time, the world ended with fire, and Palmer Martinez had greeted the planes the only way an American knew how -- guns blazing. The fire smoked out the bunker, and that was _how_ he died -- but the _why_ of it was that there had been one spot too few on the last plane out of Juneau, and having been the real Dad, when the question of who was getting the last seat came up, Palmer had insisted that he would be on the next plane -- the one that never came.  
  
Dad says I came down with a fever the same day. (And that I used to be sickly, which I didn't believe, because now I never was.)  
  
So to me, the end of the world is fever. Fire. Heat.  
  
And I don't know where Clay is, and I can feel heat rise to my face.

* * *

  
Gardenia's refusing to pick up the card. The stun attack must've got to her, I think, and now she's bitching at me in dialect, something about rabid dogs and picking their shit off the ground. Why do the Russians like to compare everything to dogs?  
  
" _Gavin, you will kill the both of us --_ "  
  
" _Name a time anyone has died in the Network,_ " I retort, tersely, in her own Russian, but she goes on anyway and I tune her out.  
  
When I say this, I'm not trying to reassure anyone, least of all myself. It's just a statement of fact. My guess goes something like this: the attacker is using some sort of exploit in the multi-battle procedure -- and that part, I only figured out because whoever they were was stupid enough to take _both_ of Roark's daemons at the same time. Otherwise it'd have been one, _then_ the other.  
  
I told Dad all of this the first time it happened -- but the thing is, Dad can be a huge dickhead when he wants. (You kind of need to be to run the Network.) He still can't find the problem, but I keep telling him he should've turned off the multi-battle procedure. ("You mean, so that motherfucker can find something else to exploit? Alright, Gavin, you tell me how you're going to fix two leaking holes once these goddamn Nips bitch at me about not being able to run their underground Yakuza multi-battle rings or some shit.")  
  
It's not so much the fact that Dad is a fucking asshole that scares me about this whole thing -- it's that I've never really seen a problem he couldn't fix before. And I dunno what it is about the Japanese and their culture -- if they're just brave, or maybe all those nukes turned them funny in the head, or they have some weird pseudo-mystical bullshit that means they're not afraid of fucking whatever. But if Dad can't fix something and they're still not shitting their pants I dunno what'll do it.  
  
I'm getting off-track. The point is that the attacker hasn't actually _stolen_ any of Gardenia's daemons -- I think they tricked the system into thinking the daemons were in a multi-battle with Gardenia as a partner, or something. In other words, if they're not here, Gardenia can suck it, the Roserade isn't going to infect us with some sort of virus or Y2K or whatever end-of-the-Network scenario she's coming up with. She watch too many American cyberpunk movies or something?  
  
" _I am going to tell Rowan,_ " she snarls one more time. " _You are fucking dead if you touch my--_ "  
  
" _What makes you think I'm not an admin, Gardenia? Fuck off._ "  
  
I pick up the 407, pull up a screen, and turn on developer mode -- the screen switches to a bunch of technical crap, most of which I don't touch even without Gardenia already clicking her tongue disapprovingly behind me. The stuff I'm looking for is the raw user data, which when I find it expands another window of encrypted gibberish.  
  
"Gardenia."  
  
" _Are you done yet, child?_ "  
  
" _I need your--_ "  
  
and then I realize _no, of course she doesn't have her user key._ That makes things complicated -- what it means is that I'm going to need to brute-force this stuff into plain English. And -- how long is that going to take?  
  
Fuck.  
  
I'm sorry, Clay.  
  
" _I'm going to need your 407 a bit longer."_

* * *

  
Dad hasn't said a word since I started jabbering into the phone. He is just taking everything in, occasionally grumbling sounds into the other end to tell me he's still listening.  
  
And it's killing me already before he even starts to _actually_ kill me.

"I'm sending you the data logs on her 407, Dad -- the thing is, it's encrypted, and, um, we're going to have to crack this. Look, uh-- I know it didn't work with Roark's daemons, but we don't have anything more to go on, um, and I-I-I don't know what--"  
  
Jesus. I'm stammering. _Stammering._ Fuck.  
  
Focus, Gavin. You're okay, you're _fine_ \--

"Gavin."  
  
My nerves freeze and I brace for my heart to follow.  
  
"Yeah?"  
  
"It's not your fault."  
  
At that point, everything becomes hazy, and I break down.


	16. orphaned process

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (Part 2 of the previous chapter, originally posted together.)

I try to gasp when I wake up and find the air sucked out of me.  
  
And it's dark. So, _so_ dark.  
  
Apart from that, I feel throbbing, dull throbbing -- head still reeling from the 407 attacking, still trying to get its bearings --  
  
\-- _where am I?_  
  
The first thing I think of is to move -- and then I find that I can't. And then--  
  
"Nnf--!"  
  
I try to say something and then I find that I can't.   
  
_rattle rattle_  
  
I try once again to move, finding that all of my nerves are there. Still nothing.   
  
Something metal clatters behind me.  
  
 _plink plink plink_  
  
I hear something -- or someone -- moving, towards here, and if I could just _breathe_ I would rein the air in, stop my heart from pounding.  
  
 _creeeeeaaak_  
  
Light, blinding light, streams in; my eyes struggle to adjust, and I --  
  
\-- That face. I _remember_ her.  
  
 _Sumomo._  
  
\-- I remember her face, her name, because Dad told me I should try to remember. But after everything that came next, everything she said -- I didn't have to.  
  
I stopped forgetting things that night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This segment was incredibly difficult to write without coming off as having... certain... implications.


	17. type coercion

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For help, type [assist -a c2-5 | less].
> 
> Type casting and coercion
> 
> In general, data is categorized into types: for example, a number like 4891 is of an integer type (while a number with a decimal component, like 3065.156, is a floating-point); a character (like 'c') is a char type, while a word like "apple" is a string type (derived from stringing together several characters). Programming languages approach the treatment of types differently: those that use static typing require the user to explicitly choose a type for data when created, while those that use dynamic typing perform operations that "guess" the most appropriate type for data when used.
> 
> There are situations where one may need to force the computer to treat data as a different type than what was assigned. For example, when adding together numbers, the computer can't simply add an integer and a decimal-point number together due to the difference in their encoding. Such situations call for conversion. Type casting refers to one explicitly forcing the computer to treat data as a different type; type coercion is when the computer is forced, on its own, to treat data as a different type.
> 
> Overflow
> 
> Computers obviously do not possess unlimited storage -- an issue well-exemplified by the limited bits allotted for storing a number. In this case, if any mathematical operation were to cause the result to exceed the maximum value the allotted space can represent, then the number will overflow and store only the digit places it can represent (for example, 1,000,041 would display as 000,041 or simply 41). The results of such calculations are highly erratic and are often extraordinarily low, compared to the actual numbers they represent.

_"Don't you find it odd? All of it?"_

Of course -- of course it's odd, of course it's wrong. And now that she is sitting here with time to think about it, the only thing she is wondering now is when and how Rowan Hawthorne, Network God himself, became so brilliant he overflowed right into balls-deep retarded -- because how stupid do you have to be to think you can get away with something like this?

The thought pisses her the fuck off.

  


* * *

  
Her name is Sumomo.

It's not her real name, even though it's the only one she tells people about these days. But the name is a relic -- a relic that reminds her of a time before the _zaibatsus_ started carving up her good old Japan like shoguns fighting for territory -- if shoguns were fat, beady-eyed fuckfaces in ill-fitting business suits who couldn't look down and tell their feet from a footlong. She was twelve back then.

She is twenty-two now. The re-partition of Japan into a collection of shithole corporate states is a fairly recent affair, one of the many who-gives-a-fuck after-effects of Russia and the United States having gone at it three years even earlier than ten. She doesn't know how it happened, only that the government collapsed because of course it did, never trust these numbskulls to keep themselves afloat because like their stupid _gaijin_ allies they go poking into wars that aren't their fucking business. I mean -- when the fuck has war been any of Japan's business? A century and a half ago? Should have stayed out of it.

Really, though, if you hadn't been living in Hokkaido at the time, the war hadn't affected you -- in the mainland, everyone had still been getting drunk on rice wine and airing their wacky game shows and making love to sweaty animé body pillows -- or in Sumomo's case, she had been fucking around with a computer the same way Rowan Hawthorne learned to, about twenty-two years earlier. So it had come as a surprise to her that one day she was no longer Japanese, but rather, Akihabaran, and instead of a divine Emperor on his Chrysanthemum Throne, she was now the subject to some faceless fatman in a skyscraper.

Still none of this affected her until the day she woke up to discover her favorite Internet textboard had been replaced by a corporate firewall that spelt something to the effect of "fuck you" on her computer screen.

SMS messaging would be blocked the week after that (they'd called it "pre-emptive security"), but by then she had already sent about a thousand text messages each to little cliques, little networks of hackers she'd met over the textboards, and that had been enough to do two things. The first, and less important, was that she had managed to get over the firewall.

The second, and the reason they had blocked SMS, was that she and all the others had, as a warning, brought down the entire state's computer network for four whole days.

On one hand -- it had been excessive, and extremely so. On the other? Rowan Hawthorne had noticed.

And Sumomo had had Rowan to thank for the fact that she was not lying in a pool of her own blood in a week.

In later years, the Akihabaran Sphere came to call it the Plum Attack. And she is called Sumomo, because the insignia they had replaced every page and every corner of the Akihabaran network with was the image of a Japanese plum.

(The plum having been the logo of the textboard she frequented -- but that barely mattered now.)

  


* * *

  
_"It's a little too convenient, isn't it?"_

When she and all the other administrators are called, she's not surprised when Rowan says the words. _Root access._ He refers them to an unassuming, thin-looking boy of about sixteen years old who sits the length of the table away from her and across, and she resists the urge to stare.

Root access is the idea that you can mold the Network to your will, at any time, and at any place within it -- and when she hears those words, she wonders again -- why did she look up to Rowan Hawthorne and think the son of a bitch was respectable? I mean, he is sitting here with eight of the nine people who he trusted to build the Network -- and now he is lying through his fucking teeth to them. Like any hacker worth their silicon, Sumomo has a long memory -- and she remembers, clear as the day it happened, Rowan had said that once the Network was built, no one in it should ever be tempted to go on a root access powertrip.

Including him.

She knows she's not the only one knitting eyebrows when Rowan says that Clay -- that's the boy's name -- is going to be working with them. She is given this as a reason -- that lazy fuck, what was his name? Roark? -- he'd _apparently_ gotten his system key stolen by some mysterious attacker who could do the same thing as Clay.

 _Yeah, right._ If Rowan is so much of a fucking genius as she thought he was, then how could someone outside of his clique ever have cracked root access, huh? So she thinks -- no, she _knows_ it for a fact: Rowan is a lying fucking bastard.

She leaves the meeting learning nothing she didn't already know.

* * *

  
_"He doesn't trust any of you. He never did."_

Sumomo has been kicking herself over this: how come she didn't think of it herself?

She remembers, now -- Rowan Hawthorne has always been a fucking asshole. There is a reason only eight of the nine people who built the Network with Rowan were in the meeting, and it's this: he unpersoned the ninth.

Cyrus McAllister.

They met a week ago. He'd told her everything -- told her everything that Rowan was planning to do, planted every thought in her head that she's kicking herself over now because she _really_ should've thought of them first. Told her what happened the day Rowan Hawthorne removed him from the Network project. He'd shrugged, downplayed it, called it "creative differences", but he hadn't needed to say more. He'd always been nice, always been personable.

Rowan had been a fucking asshole from day zero.

* * *

  
_"What if I told you we could free the Network?"_

Sumomo likes the idea. But -- nice as McAllister is, she doesn't trust him all that much, either. She's had the time to think, after the fact, and she reasons this:  


  * 1\. If Rowan Hawthorne, the God of the Network, isn't perfect, then who the fuck is?
  * 2\. If she can't trust Rowan Hawthorne not to go on a power trip, is she going to trust Cyrus McAllister?



Fuck _no._

But, she thinks, maybe there's someone else she can trust.

And she's not perfect, either, but she promises herself -- _only until Akihabara is Tokyo again, only until I don't have to answer to some fuckstick in a corporate boardroom again._

She likes to think this is what all that Zen has trained her for.

  


* * *

  
"Sleep Powder."

It comes out garbled and scrambled when it's heard, though she said the command as clear as she'd say _hello world._ And -- to her surprise -- it works. It all works. Clay and Rowan's other son and Gardenia slump in front of with thuds, and she's amazed it was so _easy_.

And she's so _close._

* * *

  
Sumomo can hear him whimpering, almost crying through the duct tape when she pulls him up by the hair and calls him a monster.

Even when he can't fight back.

And -- how would he? Root access, being a god of the virtual world -- that's one thing.

The real world is another.

She can feel anger -- anger at Rowan, anger at being _lied to_ , anger at being betrayed, anger at the idea that this _kid_ is how Rowan plans to replace her. She feels it all pour out when she screams at him, socks him across the face.

It's _wrong._ She knows it -- but she feels so wronged.

And this feels so _right._ So -- _just tonight,_ she tells herself. Cyrus is coming in the morning. She'll convince him to help her. To do anything different than what he's planning. So -- in the morning she'll be right again.

Everything will be right again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope this is clear, though if it's not -- this is Maylene. The geographically Japanese setting of this world encourages a few things to be accurate to certain versions of the game.


	18. development artifacts

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Help command: [assist -a c2-6 | less]
> 
> Wannabees
> 
> Posers; would-be hackers with neither the attitude nor the technical skill to back up their immature want for recognition. Use of the term brings to mind the larval stage of being a hacker; as though some of them eventually graduate from their immaturity.

When Dmitry walks into the office, Rowan's -- you sitting down? -- he's _hobbling._  
  
And Dmitry Zhukov has not argued with a tollbooth operator and screamed at a fucking Nip because he can't even get directions, even when he asks in Japanese -- all so that dramatic entrance, the one you see in the medical dramas, gets ruined by Rowan Hawthorne looking like death in his fucking chair.  
  
But that is the point where he is at.   
  
"Jesus," he mutters.   
  
And he stares a thousand miles into the void. Rowan's slumped figure, in the chair.  
  


* * *

  
They'd needed a name, so they called it the Circle. They were, all of them, a bunch of white college-age boys, honor students who'd get hangovers on Sundays and upload code assignments five minutes before deadline on Monday -- and that was all they were: boys. Boys, downright idiots, martians, one step from expulsion if they hadn't been so good at what they did.   
  
Rowan, summa cum laude material. Palmer, star quarterback, you'd never guess he was in with the nerds. Cyrus, artist, activist, philosopher, patriot. Bonafide idiot.   
  
And then, Dmitry.   
  
It is a pun on his last name -- Zhukov -- more than anything, but they called him Looker for a reason.   
  
Rowan still can't count how many times their dorm was occupied.  
  


* * *

  
Dmitry Zhukov: non-observant Jew, the hope of the Russian Republic, miracle of the universe.  
  
Anomaly of the universe.  
  
As far as Rowan knows, he is the fifth son to a couple of Russian Jews, the kind whose great-grandparents couldn't take the boats west when Comrade Stalin started purging undesirables by the sack.  
  
They met on the first day of college, and Rowan thinks the same thing now that he did back then: he can't believe that Dmitry's ancestors have survived communism and Comrade Stalin and all that crap -- just so their youngest grandson can get lucky and get laid in America, son of a bitch.   
  
They are friends. So this is the kind of thing that Rowan has joked about at the restaurant table hundreds of times; it's the kind of thing they joke about when they are not on the Moscow streets, pretending to speak terrible English to deter floral-print tourist dunderheads. It's the kind of thing they joke about, right up there with the perfect English accent Zhukov has when the obese man and his obese wife and their obese go-around-the-world-to-eat-at-fucking-McDonalds children are gone, the one that's better than Rowan's because the suits in the Kremlin have rubbed off on him.  
  
They are friends -- and this is why the Russians pay Zhukov: because he is the only one left from Vilnius all the way east to Vladivostok who talks to Rowan in his language; the only one from Tallinn all the way to Khabarovsk who can talk obscure Perl and multi-threading and regex golf one moment, and fourth quarter projections and portfolio diversification and liquidation of assets the other.  
  


* * *

  
And this is the point where Zhukov is at. He has seen Rowan Hawthorne as a great many things, but one of them is not sick. Sick and crumpled and hollow.   
  
"Jesus Christ," he mutters again.  
  
Rowan -- holy shit, he's awake -- looks up.  
  
"Looker?"  
  
And he coughs.  
  


* * *

  
 _I didn't take you for the type_ , Dmitry says.   
  
But the Jack Daniels is there all the same.  
  
"Gavin sent me an encrypted," Rowan breathes, low. "Told me to look for usage data."  
  
Cough.   
  
"Did you want any?" Clinking glass.  
  
Dmitry hesitates. But -- "I'm past that. What did you find?"  
  
Rowan doesn't say anything, for a second; Looker wonders.   
  
Wonders who, when he says it, is going to hurt.  
  
"Sumomo."  
  


* * *

  
"You know what they say," Dmitry finally says when the silence passes, when he's muttered the _fuck, I'm sorry_ and they just sit there for a while. "Bros before--"  
  
"She really looked up to me, Dmitry," Rowan says. "I wish it was just that. Like in college."  
  
"College?"  
  
"Before Aly. There was that girl, remember. The psycho."  
  
"June, right?"  
  
"Yeah. It's not as simple as that anymore, Dmitry. Sumomo isn't as simple as when you stuck your dick in crazy."  
  
And Dmitry laughs. It's a joke, God bless -- Rowan's not dead. But Rowan adjusts himself in the chair.   
  
"What did you want?"  
  


* * *

  
Rowan's face turns to stone--  
  
"I'm so close, Dmitry. I don't _have_ to."  
  
Coughs again. Again. Until the glasses rattle on the desk.  
  
"I don't doubt that," Looker says. "Even if that wasn't inspiring. And -- I know. I don't want to have to force you to do something you don't want to. But you know, Rowan. You know these goddamn suits like I do."  
  
"They're idiots." Rowan hisses.  
  
"They're idiots," Dmitry repeats. "But they just want you to talk to them, Rowan. Just this once."  
  
"No," and Rowan says this like it's final, but Dmitry is getting impatient, he wishes he has the time for this shit. But he doesn't. "Dmitry, I just need more time--"  
  
"You disabled status moves, Rowan. You've asked me to tell them maintenance. Twice. In two weeks."  
  
"Please," Rowan breathes.   
  
"And I can _do that_ , Rowan," Dmitry goes on. "But they're _idiots_ , Rowan. They keep asking me why, Rowan. And what am I going to tell them?"  
  
"Tell them it doesn't concern--"  
  
"What am I going to tell them, Rowan," Dmitry finally snaps, "if you can't even tell me?"  
  
This is when Dmitry freezes -- realizes he's been shouting.   
  
And he only realizes this in the surprise. Because Rowan Hawthorne has never shut up, totally gone stone silent on him in an argument.  
  
"Just," and he is back to a whisper, "an announcement. Technical notes. A memo. Anything, Rowan. You can't keep them in the dark."  
  
Still silent.  
  
"You can't keep me in the dark."  
  
"Dmitry."  
  
"Yeah?"  
  
"I need you to help me."  
  
Once more, like it's for effect -- Rowan hacks, nearly tears his lungs out. And Dmitry breathes.   
  
He can work with this.  
  
"What do you need?"


End file.
